It remains controversial, critics say young people can't provide informed consent for many, many things but Dr. Olson-Kennedy wanted to do a U.S. study similar to one done in Netherlands which found kids given these interventions were happier.(1)
Dr. Olson-Kennedy and colleagues recruited 95 people, about a quarter of whom were chosen because they were depressed or suicidal, and gave them hormone blockers, with the hypothesis that preventing biological changes would lead to less dysphoria and more happiness. After following them for two years, the results were not what they expected.
They weren't happier.
Johanna Olson-Kennedy, MD. Credit: Children's Hospital Los Angeles.
So Dr. Olson-Kennedy put the results in a drawer - despite the work being taxpayer-funded - and refuses to publish them, not because the data were flawed, but because, she says, “I do not want our work to be weaponized.” She also claims the NIH cut their funding - nine years later - so she couldn't "afford" to publish it. The program got $10 million, $1,000 in a publication fee or time to write up the results wasn't in the original budget?
If none of that reads authentic, you see the problem for public trust in science and why scientists need to take a stand against this kind of overt nefarious behavior even if it is by a political ally. Even postmodernists in philosophy departments see the flaws in her reasoning.
If you insist negative results will be culturally weaponized, it's challenging to deny you were trying to create positive results to weaponize your cause.
There are five reasons scientists and doctors need to call this out, for the good of all children, including the ones she thinks she's helping.
1. NIH grants are not Christmas gifts, you can't just put one in your drawer because you don't like the color, and if the result disappointed you, and that means you think it can be used as a weapon, then it leads to criticism the study design was created as a weapon for your cause.
2. Doctors are not scientists but the public doesn't really know the difference. None of her work is science, or uses the scientific method the way the public believe it operates. If the public does believe this breezy veil of science is becoming the norm, the backlash will lead to government funding less science, and young scholars who have done nothing wrong won't be able to get jobs. Because universities gave older academics who caused the cultural problem tenure. For life.
3. Reality wins, and climate change skepticism shows this is not the way. Climate scholars are not trusted by a giant swath of the public for reasonable cause. They do only hire insiders for faculty jobs and they have suppressed results they didn't want to become "weaponized." "Hide the decline" and "statistical tricks" are mantras of climate science deniers, but it was an entirely avoidable problem. The ends justified the means, to a few, who let the IPCC claim the Himalayas would be gone, and that, plus denial of science about electric cars, shattered the public trust in their work.
4. The methodology is garbage, which is actually going to help her position. If she allows others to criticize the data, they will debunk the methodology so badly that her hypothesis isn't invalid scientifically, it was just another bad paper. Which means her efforts aren't the science consensus, she didn't know what she was doing. And she could still be right.(2)
5. The NIH is not conspiring against her and it's reckless to allege that.
The Biden administration's NIH would love to fund more studies of these things - unless you refuse to publish your results from nine years ago because you claim the Biden administration is against trans kids.(3) The Obama administration was no great friend to the LGBTQ community, Democrats only accepted gay marriage in 2012 - and only then because the Joe Biden we got in 2021 was already so far gone in 2012 he thought it was part of the Democratic platform and said it was. So Democrats had to switch from their 2008 position opposing gay marriage. Yet the Obama NIH funded this, because they wanted answers.
They still do. This paper doesn't provide them, mostly because it was constructed so badly, but that doesn't mean a good study can't be conducted, if the team this time includes an independent expert who can make it more rigorous.
She wanted kids taking her treatment to be happier, and they were not, and then flipped to claiming they were already happy, after claiming 25% of them were suicidal.
Maybe the study doesn't need a better methodology, it needs a better leader.
NOTES:
(1) "Happier" is somewhat challenging to quantify. Every year some survey claims Finland is the happiest place on the planet but no one who's been to Finland, or who lives there, believes it. Demographers who aren't trying to get into the New York Times know their culture is actually stoic. So they feel a societal obligation to say they are happy on surveys. Americans are so well-off we have to invent race problems and concerns about harmless chemicals in water, and that means on surveys we claim the Republic Is Doomed.
(2) Galileo was an idiot who claimed the moon had no effect on the tides, and that they should happen once a day, and ridiculed scientists and sailors who knew he was wrong. He still got one thing right later, and now is lionized by militant atheists who think the Catholic Church, rather than other scientists, thought he was a crank.
(3) Professor Tyrone Hayes faces a similar credibility claim because 20 years ago he alleged frogs were 'being turned gay' by a weedkiller, and then refused to show any data to EPA when they wanted to use his work to ban the product.
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